How to Cite a Report: Group Authors, Report Numbers and Publishers

Reports from government agencies, research institutes, international organizations and companies are gray literature: not peer reviewed, but widely cited in policy and technical work. The key questions are who the author is and what the report number is. Style-by-style examples are generated below.

Elements and where to find them

Korean government publications carry a long registration number (starting with 11) on the copyright page. It is an administrative number and is not normally cited; cite the institute's series number instead.

Person or organization?

If researchers are named on the cover, cite them. If only the organization appears on the cover and the researchers are listed inside, the organization is usually the author. For agencies within departments, APA uses the most specific agency as author and the parent as publisher.

Where the styles differ

In-text citations and parts of reports

Group authors appear in the text citation too. In APA, a long name can be abbreviated after defining it once: (Korea Development Institute [KDI], 2024), then (KDI, 2024). The reference list always uses the full name.

If you used one chapter or appendix, cite the whole report and give the chapter or page in the text. Large reports whose chapters have separate authors can be cited chapter by chapter, like a chapter in an edited book. When you take a statistical table from a report, give the table number, and consider citing the original statistics directly.

Common mistakes

• Citing the government registration number as the report number.
• Using the project period instead of the publication year.
• Confusing interim and final reports.
• Using an abbreviation (KDI) in the reference list instead of the full name.
• Linking to attachment URLs that change.

Korean reports

Government-commissioned policy research is searchable in PRISM, and national R&D reports in NTIS and ScienceON. Research institutes list their numbered reports on their own sites. Reports from the OECD, the World Bank and similar bodies often carry DOIs; check their "Cite this" information.

Checklist

1. Person or organization decided from the cover
2. Publication year used
3. Citable report number included
4. Author and publisher duplication handled per style
5. Stable landing-page URL

Related tools

Choose "Report" in the reference generator. Check group-author text citations in the in-text citation generator, and convert @techreport records with the BibTeX and RIS converter.

Side-by-side by style

These examples are generated by this site's formatting engine from fictional sample data (not real publications).

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